Communications Revolutions and the Enactment of Culture

Abstract

This essay examines first the instrumental biases which have been imported into the study of communication and culture by the fixation upon the "media" of communication. It goes on to examine traditional communications revolutions noting the salient difference between these and contemporary transformations of communicative practice. In conclusion, I raise the question of why changes in communication have always stimulated anxieties about the stability of social and psychic norms. To answer this question one must be aware of the symbolic values which the media—oral, literate, and electronic—have acquired. It is by manipulating these values that the history of communication can become a "myth" and an enactment of our contemporary cultural situation.